The Probability of Miracles (7 page)

“Let's go, bitches,” she said in jest as she held up the crumpled bag. Alicia snatched it from her hand, and Cam said, “Maineward ho.”

“Who's Maineward, and why is she a ho?” asked Perry as they made the treacherous walk through the mangroves back to the car.

“WE CAN READ THEM, PERRY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ THEM OUT loud,” said Cam.

Perry had been sucked into her first roadside attraction—that friendly euphemism for “tourist trap.” They had been on the road for six long hours, and they were getting a little
loca
. Alicia had become obsessed with redialing the number for the ghost hotel in Promise, Maine—no one ever picked up—and Perry could not stop reading road signs. The South of the Border billboards had started in Georgia at about ten miles apart, and now, halfway into South Carolina, they were practically every ten yards. Cam's personal favorite—SOUTH OF THE BORDER: YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A PLACE!—had a three-dimensional, fifteen-foot-long hot dog hanging from the top of it in the shape of a smile.

Cam was actually grateful for the billboards. They gave her something to look at aside from the bleak landscape of America the beautiful. Beauty didn't seem to be a priority for people anymore. If you had to judge from I-95, America had become cancerous clusters of cheap houses, replicating out of control. They were dropped into empty, treeless soybean fields and connected by strip mall after superstore after strip mall. People just needed places to collect their stuff. Each house had a swing set and a green lawn littered with plastic toys. No one even built a fence to hide the plastic toy habit. People were shameless about their consumption of plastic.

It was no wonder the polar bears were drowning.

They were getting close. Cam could see the lights of the sombrero tower blinking above the pine trees like a UFO. And when they rounded the next bend and Alicia drove Cumulus between the legs of an enormous neon Pedro—South of the Border's offensive Mexican-guy mascot—all Cam could think was,
Por qué?

South of the Border was empty. (Hadn't people seen the signs?) It was dusty, dry, and desolate. Just a few warehouses filled with schlock dropped in the middle of nowhere. Scattered throughout the compound were plaster-of-paris statues of animals from Africa. An orange giraffe; a huge, T-shirt-wearing gorilla. What these had to do with Mexico, Cam could not imagine. It cost a dollar to take the elevator to the top of the sombrero tower, where you could look at nothing for miles around.

“Wow, this place has really gone downhill,” said Alicia. She finally stopped dialing the Promise Breakers Hotel, took the phone away from her ear, and looked around.

“Right. I'm sure it was very classy once.”

“It wasn't this bad.”

Cam was glad she got to see it at night, though, where the neon gave the place its special cache. South of the Border at night was quite a wonder. Sleazy, cheap, gaudy, garish, and filthy, except for the absence of any visible prostitutes, it almost compared to the real Tijuana. She put Tweety back in his cage and covered it up so he didn't have to witness the vulgarity.

“Okay, everyone gather round the stereotype,” said Cam. Her dad used to say that when Disney tourists asked to have their picture taken with him. Cam took out her camera and snapped a shot of Perry and her mom pinching the cheeks of a huge plaster-of-paris Pedro.

Then she headed toward Gift Shop West, the city block–size store filled with, in Cam's estimation, much better stuff than Gift Shop East on the opposite side of the compound.

“The unicorn section is in Gift Shop East,” said Perry.

“Then I'll meet you guys at the arcade.”

Inside GSW were acres of shot glasses, snow globes, wind chimes, toothpick holders, keychains, bumper stickers, bobbleheads, and assorted novelties. It was rest stop heaven. Cam got to work. She could have paid for things with her check from Disney, but she had unfortunately become a little addicted to the thrill of shoplifting.

“This will be the last time,” she told herself. She knew that was what addicts said, but this really would be the last time.

She found the perfect gift for Perry right away. She was standing in front of a rotating rack of plastic, personalized coffee mugs, and they actually had a “Perry.” It was for a boy Perry—blue, with a big soccer ball bulging out from the side of it—but that was perfect. Perry hated that her name was “gender-neutral,” and when she wrote it herself, she spelled it “Peri” and dotted the
I
with a big daisy. She had changed herself into a prefix.

The mug would piss her off for a second, but then it would make her laugh. Cam slipped it into the front pocket of her hoodie, and then for her mom she stole a googly-eyed frog made out of seashells. Her mother detested seashell arts and crafts. She vowed that she'd never have seashells as part of her décor. Especially in her bathroom. Cam would insist that this frog live in their bathroom in Maine.

Not that they'd come close to securing a room in Maine. Cam was pretty sure this hotel did not even exist. She slid a flamingo-shaped backscratcher down her pants. She was wearing her multipocketed cargo pants that tied at the knees so she could really pull in a good haul. And then she got a text from Lily:

YMSYCTAI [Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept It]: Btl rckts from Rckt City + Roman candle.

 

They were stopping at Lily's in about an hour, and Cam couldn't wait. If Lily wanted bottle rockets, then Cam would get bottle rockets.

South Carolina was one of the few states left that didn't have laws against letting your kids blow their fingers off with M-80s. Cam pretended to browse her way out of the gift shop and made it across the road to the fireworks store Rocket City. It was next to the gas station, which seemed to Cam like some bad planning. Who would put an explosives shop next to the gas station? Anyway, it was an easy mission to complete because the toothless woman at the counter was busy watching a monster truck pull on TV.

The long fuses from the bottle rockets scraped Cam's legs as she walked past the defunct, decrepit, and broken-down Sombrero Ride, the train, and the roller coaster, which would be fixed next month, according to Carlos, who stood guard at the empty gate.

Cam found her mom and Perry at the arcade. Perry, a white unicorn galloping across her left cheek, was pleading with her mom to get her biorhythm chart from an old faux wood–paneled machine from the seventies.

Alicia was still on the phone, listening once again to the busy signal of the only hotel in Promise, Maine.

Perry eventually won her negotiation. Alicia fed a dollar into the machine, yellow lights flashed around a blinking swami's head, and Perry put her finger in a clamp that looked like the one Cam had to use in the hospital to measure her oxygen levels. The lights blinked again, and then the machine spit out a card that said Perry would be lucky in love.

No shit
, thought Cam.
She's a blonde Scandinavian goddess.
Did they have someone sitting inside this machine?

“You try it, Cam. Go ahead.”

“Right. And if it says I'm lucky in love, we know it's a sham.”

Cam placed her finger in the clamp, the lights blinked, the swami's head blinked off entirely. The machine spit out Cam's card halfway and stopped.

She could already tell that her card was different than Perry's. There was no pretty red border around it, and when she tried to pull it out, it was as if the swami were pulling it back. He wouldn't let go of it. Cam tugged harder, using two hands, but it wouldn't budge. She put one foot up onto the machine and yanked one last time. When the card finally unstuck, she fell backward. She looked down. In her hands was a blank piece of paper.

She turned it over to see if something was printed on the other side. She looked back into the slot, but there was no other ticket. The swami's wax face seemed to smirk at her.

“It's blank,” Cam said, disappointed in spite of herself.

“See,” said Perry. “You have to believe in it, or it won't know you exist.”

Cam crumpled the card in her palm. Maybe her oxygen levels were just really low. She'd been feeling weak since Atlanta, and she should probably go to the hospital. But she knew if she could get a good night's sleep, she'd be fine in the morning.

Or maybe not. Maybe her future was blank, after all.

LILY'S DRIVEWAY, LITTERED WITH PINE NEEDLES, WOUND INTO THE tall, piney woods and opened up on to a newfangled log cabin–style home. The way Log Cabin syrup is “maple-style,” it was an enormous, diluted, imitation of the real thing. The severe horizontal lines of the architecture were broken up by beautiful arched windows and softened by a completely chaotic English-style garden growing out of control in the front yard. The wet grass of the backyard sloped down to the lake.

It was only eight o'clock, but Cam was tired. It had taken them less than an hour to get to Lily's from South of the Border, and during the ride, Cam hadn't been sure she would make it. Her head throbbed and everything ached. She almost had to resort to the little dropper of morphine she kept in the secret knee-pocket of her cargo pants for emergencies, but she didn't want to be crabby and irritated when she saw Lily, so she drank a ton of water instead and took some of her stolen calendula root from Whole Foods. But the sight of Lily's house eased some of Cam's pain. She'd only been there once before, but the house felt instantly familiar and comforting. People here knew what it was like.

Cam stepped out of the car and stretched her arms in the air. Before she could even put her shoes on, Lily bolted out the front door, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her down the hill toward the water.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” Cam chanted as she tried unsuccessfully to dodge the pine cones that kept ending up under her feet.

“Watch out for those,” said Lily, who whisked ethereally around them in a white, flowing dress like a tiny wood fairy.

They tiptoed out to the end of the dock, where Lily had set up two Cokes, a box of cigarettes, and a big abalone shell she was using as an ashtray. The fiberglass of the motorboat squeaked as it occasionally rubbed up against the tires nailed to the side of the dock. The only other sounds were the chorus of the crickets and the lip-smacking noise of the water as it lapped up against the boat. The moon cast a glimmering yellow path on the water, as if inviting you to walk on it.

“So, I did it,” said Lily as she lit a bottle rocket and sent it screaming off the dock. It exploded with a pop that echoed over the lake. Turned out Lily was quite the pyrotechnics expert—or pyromaniac, Cam wasn't sure. “What else did you bring me?” she asked, hungrily digging through Cam's bag for another explosive.

“Wait! Back up. You did what?” asked Cam. From the looks of it, Lily had done a lot of things differently since she and Cam had bunked together at their last clinical trial in Memphis. Her hair, normally spiked in a punk pixie and highlighted with green, was back to its natural dirty blonde. It was now tamed, shoulder-length, and held back with a thin, unadorned headband. She had stopped using her bold, liquid eyeliner and instead wore some soft blue (blue!) eye shadow that matched the crystalline of her eyes. “What did you do, Alice, jump down the rabbit hole?”

“I guess you could put it that way.” Lily smirked. She sat next to Cam at the end of the dock and put her feet in the water.

“You did
it
, it?” asked Cam, seeing how far she could splash and then watching the water settle in concentric ripples.

“Affirmative.” Lily kicked out her foot, sending a few drops of water about two feet farther than Cam's latest splash.

“With whom?”

“Ryan,” said Lily, and she couldn't stop herself from smiling.

“Who is Ryan?” Cam asked. She was shocked that this was the first time she was hearing about this. They talked to each other every day. How had Lily failed to mention that she had a “lover”?

“I met him at church.”

“You go to church now?” The surprises just kept on coming.

“And youth group,” said Lily as she pulled her foot out of the water. She shivered a bit, grabbed her bright orange beach towel, and wrapped it around her. She snuggled up next to Cam, shoulder to shoulder.

“Aren't you youth group people against premarital sex?” Cam asked, wondering how Lily could possibly be cold. It was still eighty degrees and humid in spite of the slight breeze wafting in over the lake.

“Publicly.”

“And privately?”

“Like rabbits.”

“Ahh. Thank you for finally solving for me the mysterious allure of youth group,” said Cam. “So do you go to Christian rock concerts now?”

“No. I had to draw the line somewhere,” Lily explained. She still listened to Rancid, Propagandhi, Anti-Flag, and the Dead Kennedys, but she was straying away from Crucifux and Christ on a Crutch, for Ryan's sake. Lord's name in vain, and all that.

“What does he look like? I'm getting a gangly, freckly, pimply vibe.”

“Cam.”

“In a good way. I mean pimply in a good way.”

“How can you be pimply in a good way?”

“I don't know.” Cam felt something. Was it jealousy? Was she jealous of gangly, pimply Ryan? Or envious that Lily was having this experience? Or furious that Lily had never told her about it? She was suddenly embarrassed that she had sloppily confessed her every private thought and desire to Lily, while Lily was up here leading a secret life. She watched a firefly hovering over the lake blink five times before asking, “So is Ryan, like, your boyfriend?”

“Once he breaks up with Kaitlin.”